They were lying in an outhouse, side by side, each figure decently covered by a cloth. The first to be exposed I recognised without surprise, and at a glance, as that of the hapless Parker. He was dressed just as he had been when I last saw him, and with the handcuffs still on his wrists. The second body was, to the best of my belief, that of his late associate, Smudgy. I could not swear to the features, for Smudgy had been stationed at the top of the staircase while I was in the opium den, and I had kept too close an eye upon the Dumpling, and the man who had remained with him in the room, to pay much attention to what was going on outside. Unless I was very much mistaken, however, the shabby greeny-fawn dust coat and the frayed shepherds' plaid trousers were the same which I had seen upon one of the two men who had remained on guard at the head of the stairs, and had afterwards been despatched, in company with Parker, to cut off my retreat at the back of the house. When I had last seen him, he had been in full flight across the moon-lit space of waste land, and in a direction away from the river. Whether he was dead or alive when he got into the water, or how he came to be there at all, I had no means of knowing, and could only conjecture that, finding he had been duped, and fearing the Dumpling's anger on hearing of my escape, Smudgy had returned to the river in search of myself and Parker, and had been accidentally drowned. The third body was next uncovered. Apparently the corpse, in its passage down the river, had been caught by the screw of a passing steamer, and so cut and crushed as to be unrecognisable. The bones of all the limbs were twisted and broken, the body beaten almost into a pulp, and the whole of the face sliced off, as if by a stroke of the steamer's swiftly revolving screw. Then, for the first and, I hope, last time in my life, I fainted--fainted from sheer horror, for around the otherwise naked body was a leather belt from which a ragged inch of what had once been trousering still clung. Looking more closely, I saw that it was of blue silk, with tiny zigzagged threads of silver interwoven. Not many hours ago I had seen a man who, to my positive knowledge, always wore a leather belt (he had at one time been a sailor) around his waist. He had then been clad in Chinese trousering of the identical pattern--blue silk with a tiny zigzagged thread of interwoven silver. That man was my unhappy friend, Robert Grant, and, looking again at the body, I saw that some sort of yellow dye had recently been used to stain the face and hands and neck. CHAPTER X. I TURN BURGLAR.